Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / Leaving the one way street. Episode 1. Reality Fracture

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Leaving the one way street. Episode 1. Reality Fracture · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee from the Children's Consultancy Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: And welcome to another podcast series.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: This one is entitled Believing the One Way Street.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this first episode focuses on the hidden destruction of relationships.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this is underpinned by deception, envy, ingratitude, but then ultimately recovery.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: So when the truth begins to bend, the psychology of deception.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now every relationship begins with a shared sense of reality.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Two people look at the world together and in so doing create a small psychological space where truth can live between them.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: But what happens when that reality slowly begins to fracture?
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's a moment in some relationships that is almost impossible to describe.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing dramatic happens, there is no confession, no argument, or no obvious sign that something is wrong, and yet something shifts.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps a story changes slightly.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: A detail that once seemed clear suddenly becomes blurred.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: An explanation arrives that feels incomplete.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And at first the mind does what it always does.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: It tries to in some way repair the inconsistency.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: You reassure yourself that it must be a misunderstanding.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: After all, relationships depend on trust.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: But slowly another experience begins to emerge.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: A quiet sense of unease, a subtle disturbance in your sense of reality.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you notice contradictions.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: You notice that the words don't quite match the behavior.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Moments that seem to disappear when you try to revisit them.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually a question appears that feels deeply uncomfortable.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not a question about the other person, it's a question about yourself.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it's something like, did that really happen?
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Did I misunderstand or am I imagining this?
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it is here that the deception begins to do its most damaging work.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because the most dangerous aspect of dishonesty is not simply that someone lies or conceals.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: The most dangerous aspect is that it can cause another human being to doubt their own perception of reality.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Let me ask you something.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever found yourself in a conversation or situation with someone you care about and then suddenly felt confused?
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: You remember something clearly, something that was said, something that happened, but the other person calmly tells you that you're mistaken, that it never happened that way.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: And you try to explain and you repeat what you remember, but the more you try to clarify, the more certain the other person's version of events is expressed.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And totally the conversation changes, it stops being about what happened, and it becomes about whether your perception can be trusted at all.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: At that moment, something very important has shifted because the conversation is no longer the truth.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: It is about whose reality will survive the conversation.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And in some instances, when you revisit something, the other person swerves it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: When you try and ask and find yourself explaining, find yourself trying to seek the common ground, but the other person won't enter into it.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: This avoidant behavior is also very damaging.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Relationships depend upon something fundamental, shared psychological reality.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: Two people must be able to trust that this what in what was said and what was experienced corresponds to truth.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: When deception enters a relationship, that shared reality begins to fracture.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes deception appears as direct lies, but more often it's quieter, omissions, half-truths, selective disclosure, and carefully managed narratives.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: And each distortion allows the deceiving person to avoid anxiety or accountability and responsibility.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: But each one also introduces instability into the relationship.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: In psychotherapy, we sometimes describe the impact of repeated deception as the destabilization of reality.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And when a person repeatedly encounters contradictions, what they experience and what they are told being different, the mind begins to lose confidence in its own perception.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And this is why deception can feel profoundly disorientating and destabilizing.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, it can feel disabling.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: The individual is no longer simply questioning the other person, they're questioning themselves.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Over the years I've sat with many individuals who arrived in therapy deeply confused.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: They were intelligent people, perceptive, emotionally thoughtful, and yet they doubted their own understanding of events.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Not because they lacked insight, but because they had been exposed to repeated distortions of reality.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually, clarity emerges.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: The problem was never their perception.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: The problem was deception itself.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Healthy relationships built upon things which stabilize reality.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Each person's experience helps anchor the other.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: But where deception becomes habitual, reality begins to drift.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And when that happens, the most important task is not trying harder to understand the other person, it's learning to trust one's own perception again.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: When truth becomes distorted, the mind eventually has to choose.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Not between the other person and the relationship, but between illusion and reality.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: In the next episode, we're going to look at something that I'm calling the quiet violence of envy.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.